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Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

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— Ph.D.,
University of Wisconsin

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Biography

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Cañizares-Esguerra got his PhD at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Before UT, he taught at Illinois State University and SUNY-Buffalo. He has also been a visiting professor in several universities outside the United States, including the Universidade Federal do Ouro Preto (Mariana- Brazil); the Universidade Etaduale de Campinas (Campinas-Brazil); the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá-Colombia); the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogota-Colombia); the FLACSO (Quito-Ecuador);the Universidad de los Andes (Santiago-Chile)

Cañizares-Esguerra has won numerous national fellowships given by the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment of the Humanities (at the John Carter Brown Library), the Andrew Mellon (at the Huntington Library), the Charles Warren Center of Studies of American History (at Harvard); the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; and the Donald D. Harrington Fellows Program (at the University of Texas). In 2010 Canizares-Esguerra was the Andrew Mellon Senior Fellow of the John Carter Brown Library.In 2014-2015 he is a senior Research Fellow at the Kellogg Institute, University of Notre Dame.

Cañizares-Esguerra has received numerous prizes, including the 1999-2001 best article award from the Forum in the History of the Human Sciences of the History of Science Society; the 2001 AHA prize on Atlantic History; the 2001 AHA prize in Latin American and Spanish History; and the 2006-2007 biannual Honorable Mention of the Murdo MacLeod Book Prize of The Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association. His How to Write the History of the New World was cited among the best books of the year (2001) by The Economist. It also made into the “best book of the year” lists of TLS and the Independent (London).

Cañizares-Esguerra is member of several journal editorial boards, including Atlantic Studies, The Hispanic American Historical Review, the Journal of Early Modern History; Memoria y Sociedad, and Tierra Brasilensis.

He is the author of more than 60 journal articles and book chapters. He has also authored several books: How to Write the History of the New World (Stanford 2001--translated into Spanish and Portuguese); Puritan Conquistadors (Stanford 2006; translated into Spanish); Nature, Empire, and Nation (Stanford 2007); The Atlantic in Global History, 1500-2000 (co-edited, with Erik Seeman), and The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (co-edited with Jim Sidbury and Matt Childs). He is currently writing a book entitled Bible and Empire: The Old Testament in the Spanish Monarchy, from Columbus to the Wars of Independence.

Course Description:The history of the European colonial expansion into the New World has lately been changing as scholars question traditional national narratives. US colonial history was more than simply the preface to the foundation of the American nation. The thirteen original colonies were part of a much larger British Empire that included plantations in the Caribbean and Canada and holdings in Africa and India. To understand colonial history we need to understand the British Empire as a whole and its interactions with other empires and continents: Ottoman, Chinese, Japanese, Native American, African, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and French. This course explores the histories of the peoples whose interactions and struggles shaped colonial history: Native Americans, Africans, Asians, and the various European settlers.

Don’t be put off by the amount of reading in this class. If anything, this class will teach you how to get quickly, accurately, and critically to the argument and structure of books. If you are interested in pursuing a professional or graduate degree, this seminar is cut out for you.

Grading Policy:This class is writing intensive and will be conducted as a reading seminar. Students will every week turn in a 1-2 page evaluation of the week's readings (80 %). To get an A, students should clearly identify the argument of the book/article as well as the author's sources and methodology. Students should also bring to class three questions for discussion. Students will write a short, 4 page final paper: a prospectus for future research based on one of the topics tackled by the readings (10%). The remaining 10 % of the grade corresponds to attendance and participation.